


Mass Effect 3 - Endings Analysis

by JestersTear



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Essays, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-10
Updated: 2017-06-10
Packaged: 2018-11-12 06:45:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11156451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JestersTear/pseuds/JestersTear
Summary: Opinion piece on the endings of ME3





	Mass Effect 3 - Endings Analysis

**Author's Note:**

> This was an article I originally wrote in Portuguese for the website that I reviewed games for. They hadn't asked for the article, but I had been doing a series of reviews for them, covering the whole Mass Effect saga, and was really hoping to end with this piece. It was written before the expanded endings DLC . Unfortunately they didn't want to publish something that was so full of spoilers, and the article never got to see the light of day. The other day it occurred to me that I could simply translate it and leave it here up for debate, should anyone want to comment. And here it is.

Ever since I finished Mass Effect 3 I’ve been wanting to share my opinion regarding the ending(s). “Wanting to” might just take the award for euphemism of the year - what I really mean is that it’s an almost absolute need that has been voraciously consuming my brain. (Overly dramatic? Who, me?)

It’s been such a pressing need that I begged to be allowed to write these words even though this is an opinion piece, and I haven’t debated said opinion with anyone else, so here comes the mandatory disclaimer: this is my opinion, not anyone else’s. I have no idea whether the rest of the team shares it or if they think I’m utterly insane.

Either way, and before I finally get on with saying my piece, a warning: if you haven’t yet finished the game, this article is the mother of all spoilers. Run now, because we’re getting to the edge of the map: Here Be Dragons.

For those of you who haven’t been properly scared off by the dragons and the end-of-world abyss that inevitably awaits all those insane or daring enough to venture outside the territory of cartographers, here’s a summary of the endings based on my first playthrough: 

Our Shepard has spent an entire game holding their breath, recruiting races left and right and facing a never-ending stream of bittersweet moments able to bring to tears the sharpest edge of the most indifferent rock: s/he helped cure the genophage and lost a friend; gave the gift of free independent thought to an entire synthetic race and lost another friend; s/he managed miracles like having Turians, Krogan and Salarians - or even more improbable, Quarians and Geth - fight side by side; s/he managed to prove to the Illusive Man, a fervorously maniac villain who was already under Reaper control, that his megalomaniacal plan of being able to control said Reapers was nothing more than self-delusion aided by a bit of indoctrination, and s/he did it so well that the poor villain ended up shooting himself in the head; s/he was moved, infuriated, s/he loved, got hurt, laughed, cried, put admirals in their place and showed a different way of thinking to a 50000 year-old being; let us not forget that, in the previous game, s/he had already died and been brought back to life; s/he balanced being an overwhelming force of nature with being a vulnerable human, and did do magnificently.

After all this Shepard sees the end of the line approaching, the moment where s/he either finds a way of defeating the Reapers or the galaxy will go back to the stone age, only this time without Humans, Asari, Turians, Krogan, Salarians, Quarians, Elcor, Batarians, Hanar, Drell and Volus to tell the tale. Already gravely wounded and not knowing who is dead or alive, after witnessing the death of one of the only people who has always believed in her/him, a friend and mentor who was basically a father figure, Shepard bites down the pain of loss and drags herself/himself up to a platform taking her/him to the place where s/he hopes to still be able to save organic life as we know it. And this is where it all goes south. 

We’re confronted with the hologram of a human child, with whom Shepard has been hallucinating since the beginning of the game. As far as I’m concerned I could have done without the hallucinations; I could justify the child’s human look with the idea that maybe the Catalyst had always been designed to visually adapt to the race of whoever got there, but then how does Shepard already know how the child looks even before getting there? Oh, well. 

The moment we walk out of the platform this Deus Ex Machina child, whom no one suspected existed ten minutes before, launches into a diatribe on how the Reapers are the solution, not the problem. The solution? The solution to what? Apparently to the fact that organics inevitably always create synthetic life, that then - once again inevitably, because said child is not only determinist but fatalistic as well - rises against its creators and kills them. Then, as is obvious (for whom?), the solution is to find a race of mega ships that, roughly every 50000 years, annihilates all organic life that’s evolved beyond a certain technological point, so that other races who are only now taking their first steps have time to evolve enough so that they, too, can create synthetic life to one day rise up against them. Confused? I know I am. 

And why are they only showing up now, when both organics and synthetics have united against them in a moving example of cooperation, instead of showing up over a hundred years ago, when the Quarians decided to slaughter the Geth? Moving on.

Ever so nicely, and in order to “preserve” the races that they annihilate, the Reapers condense a few million beings of each of those races into other Reapers. Oh, so that’s what it was! If I had known that this was why they’d been liquidifying human beings in Mass Effect 2 then I wouldn’t have been upset at all!

The first rather imperative question is who created this Fallacious Insidious Annihilating Scrupleless Child Object - we’ll call it FIASCO for short - that is presenting itself as the solution to all evil? It keeps claiming that it created the Reapers, but who created _it_? I am not overly bothered by the fact that Shepard is unable to find that out - I am tremendously bothered by the fact the Commander doesn’t even try.

Assuming we have a brilliant EMS and a Galactic Readiness to die for, FIASCO tells us we have three options:

Option #1 is destroying the Reapers. Well, great, that’s exactly what we came here to do. Oh, but, wait, it turns out that we can’t actually destroy the Reapers without annihilating all synthetic life - including the Geth, who are now our allies, and the AI that our pilot is in a serious loving relationship with - and without destroying every Mass Relay in the process.

Ouch. 

This option hurts tremendously, and it leaves us with a bitter aftertaste (I cried) but, ultimately, genocide to save the galaxy from the Reapers is something Shepard was already forced to do when s/he blew up the Batarians’ Mass Effect Relay in Arrival. But maybe we don’t have to, we think, filled with hope, there are still two options left.

Option #2: to give up our life in order to be able to control the Reapers. I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears when Shepard heard and accepted, completely placid, that attempting to control them was an option. 

Excuse me? 

We have only just proven so definitively to the Illusive Man that such a thing wasn’t possible that the man killed himself, we used unshakeable logic, and now this two-bit FIASCO tells us something like this and Shepard doesn’t immediately puch it in its holographic face? Control the Reapers? You really expect us to believe that that’s possible? 

It’s not the fact that it’s one of the options that infuriates me, but the fact they the same Shepard that went through everything else simply accepts that it’s a viable option without yelling “FIASCO, I can see you are simply just another tool for Indoctrination, and not even a particularly clever one at that if you think I’m falling for that one. You need to be annihilated!” 

But, well, there’s still a third option left, and this one only shows up when we’ve accumulated enough resources, let’s hear it! 

Do you remember, a few paragraphs back, when I mentioned that that was where it all went south? I lied, _this_ is where. Or, if it went south there, then here it goes so far south it might even go north again and not really know it. 

Because what’s behind door #3 is no more, no less than Synthesis. To spread Shepard’s DNA through the Mass Relays to every corner of the galaxy so that every synthetic race has a little bit of organic in it, and every organic race has a little bit of synthetic. This way, FIASCO explains, we won’t have to fight each other because we will be one and the same.

I have yet to understand how no one at Bioware was frightened by the profoundly wrong message this conveys. We have spent the entire saga witnessing the evils of racism and xenophobia. Even the 50000 Prothean admitted that, in his time, the weaker races were subjugated and integrated in an empire, whereas in the modern day galactic society the different races had managed to co-exist and cooperate (sometimes less than willingly, it’s true, but they had managed it) without losing the individuality that made them who they were; and that it would possibly be that same diversity that would allow us to succeed in the fight against the Reapers. 

And now they’re telling us that the Universe’s great big hope is for everyone to become similar? Not “similar in our uniqueness,” not “together and joined by our own will despite our fundamental differences,” but literally similar, all the same, because, apparently, that’s the only way we can escape complete mutual destruction.

Many of you will accuse me of being fundamentalist; after all, with this “solution,” you will argue, the races won’t in any way, shape or form become the same as one another, they’re just going to have a tiny bit of synthetic, and vice versa for the synthetics. 

I can’t see how that message is any less dangerous than if they had told us that option #3 would turn everyone into an androgynous being with the same features, the same skin tone and wearing the same clothes - the message is still “give up that which makes you different in the name of lasting peace, start resembling everyone else, individuality is conflict”.

Isn’t this the exact opposite of what we try to teach our children if we want them to be happy? Isn’t this the exact opposite of “embrace yourself for who you are and others for who they are”? Synthesis. Fusion, homogeneous mix, xerox, herd. Is this what we should aspire to? 

If the cinematic DLC that expands upon the endings shows us a future where Synthesis was the worst possible choice, where galactic society is stagnating because ideas, just like races, are more alike than what they used to be, and that that is leading us inexorably towards depression, suicide or peaceful and silent extinction, I will think Bioware did an extraordinary job. Unfortunately I don’t think they have the courage - or the will - to do it.

I don’t think every game needs to be a social critique, or that every game needs to have an underlying ethic and moral message, but when a saga like Mass Effect presents itself from the very beginning as wanting to provoke and prod our conscience, then it has an obligation to see it through without losing itself like this. I don’t believe Bioware did it on purpose, but that lack of consciousness is even more terrifying. We can’t afford to waste the precious, only life we have trying to be more like everyone else in order to have less conflict, can we? If we waste our time and energy on that, what will be left of us to be ourselves? 

Think on that, but think it through. And then, whether you agree or disagree, if you feel like it, leave me a comment - I will love reading other interpretations and opinions.


End file.
